Discussion Forum

The anthropological imagination is fed by an range of artistic and intellectual sources; most of which are probably never acknowledged. This thread is an opportunity for anyone simply to add elements…Continue

Hi Y'all!I'm writing a piece that deals with some dilemmas of approaching certain fields and how the study can be done with certain problems the Anthropologist might need to deal with.Right now I'm…Continue

Kant maintained that perception of causation/causality was "a habit" (if I have that translation right). Contrarily, such notables as Spinoza, Einstein, Bertrand Russell have discounted the notion…Continue

Recently I found myself browsing in Amartya Sen's The Argumentative Indian. I was struck by Sen's observation that the portrayal of India as a fundamentally irrational, deeply spiritual culture is a…Continue

Coming late to a party after everyone else seems to have left. I had, to be frank, never heard of Rancière. So I did a Google search and came up with a link to Rancière for Dummies by Artnet Magazine's Ben Davis. As the title suggests, this review of The Politics of Aesthetics is more than a wee bit negative. Can anyone here offer other perspectives?

we probably need to simply recognize that there is a range of legitimate foundational definitions for studies of society, and a range of views about what makes such studies "scientific". ... it might be best to simply acknowledge that the "whole" of sociology is a mix of intellectual approaches and modes of reasoning, rather than a single coherent and systematic enterprise.

The question may be how some intellectual approaches and research communities come to hold the field, if only temporarily and partially, at a given point.